I arrange things into artworks, including paint, wood, plastic, raspberry pi, people, words, dialogues, arduino, sensors, web tech, light and code.
I use words other people have written to help guide these projects, so I read as often as I can. Most of what I read is literature (fiction) or nonfiction on philosophy, art theory, ethics and technology.
As the world around us increases in technological complexity, our understanding of it diminishes. Underlying …
Still in the dark
3 stars
James Bridle's writing and art about the complexity of network technologies is often so careful about saying everything succinctly and clinically that it's tempting to believe that he might be part machine. So if anything, this book has proven his humanity, if a little disappointingly.
In content, writing in 2017, Bridle is ahead of his time. His topics range from bias in image machine learning models to secrecy in corporate and government surveillance. However, the structure of the chapters often reads like a Wikipedia dive, leaping between stories and vaguely connected ideas with gleeful abandon. The result is a little chaotic and difficult to connect together. By no means a bad book, but there are better examples that deal with these topics more coherently.
The DisCO Manifesto is a deep dive into the world of Distributed Cooperative Organizations. Over …
Distributed Ideas
No rating
This short book documents some models and ways of using Distributed Co-operative Organisations as a structural model. It's a useful reference and resource point for a relatively novel structure of organisation. The stronger chapters are those that cross theory with practical examples, best exemplified in Chapter 3: Last Night A Distributed Cooperative Organization Saved My Life. Overall, the book is playful, nicely designed, coherent, and a useful guide for trying our something with this organisational model.
In a moment of synchronicity, Cormac McCarthy died two days before I finished this book. It was strange to see him in the headlines because I had been talking about him since I opened N Scott Momaday's masterpiece House Made of Dawn. I don't like to give equivalences when describing books, but in this case it's an obvious one. This book was a clear influence on McCarthy, either directly or indirectly. And it is powerful.
The story is about Abel, a longhair indigenous American, set between 1945 and 1952. He has grown up on a reservation in New Mexico. He suffers the indignity of this experience, and many other slights and insults to tradition and life, like a thousand small cuts.
The story is of this experience of slow erasure, of violent intolerance. I is incredible to think that this book is over 50 years old. Each section has …
In a moment of synchronicity, Cormac McCarthy died two days before I finished this book. It was strange to see him in the headlines because I had been talking about him since I opened N Scott Momaday's masterpiece House Made of Dawn. I don't like to give equivalences when describing books, but in this case it's an obvious one. This book was a clear influence on McCarthy, either directly or indirectly. And it is powerful.
The story is about Abel, a longhair indigenous American, set between 1945 and 1952. He has grown up on a reservation in New Mexico. He suffers the indignity of this experience, and many other slights and insults to tradition and life, like a thousand small cuts.
The story is of this experience of slow erasure, of violent intolerance. I is incredible to think that this book is over 50 years old. Each section has a different voice but all are captivating. Each skips between memory and story, presenting a microcosm of an experience suffered by so many. And each is beautiful and devastating.
An exquisitely illustrated, one-of-a-kind celebration of the hidden beauty of nature and the ingenuity of …
Avian Architects
5 stars
Susan Ogilvy has lovingly painted the nests of common birds in a beautiful book. Each has a description of the origin of the nest, many given to her by friends and family. This is it — the book is perfect in its simplicity.
One small complaint is an unnecessary addition of somewhat spurious descriptive information about each bird species' habits. Despite seeing the uniqueness of each nest, these descriptions jar with the individuality she paints so beautifully. The book remains perfect if you ignore these parts.
A beautiful and thoughtful guide by Thich Nhat Hanh to help mindfully move through each day. The book includes practices and thoughts for exercises as seemingly mundane as brushing teeth or preparing coffee. Each is given weight.
Later in the book, Hanh addresses heavier topics like food (of body and mind) and cycles of anger, and suggests practices of love that can help mitigate bad habits or hurtful situations. It is a beautiful, meditative book, worth having a copy to refer to as well as worth reading as a learning tool.
Monica Gagliano has written a unique book. It is a memoir of a kind describing her experience of learning from the voices of various plants: Socoba (Bellaco-caspi), Tobacco, Corn, Ayahuasca and others. The voices tell stories and help direct her scientific research.
The first half of the book is brilliant. It is fluid and calm, poetic and playful. Despite Gagliano's blinkered view of her own privilege (she writes as if everyone has the freedom to travel freely around the world and work in universities), it reads wonderfully and creatively and she constructs a philosophy that is like an intersection between Deleuze & Guattari and Donna Haraway, although not calling on either. Instead she calls on various plants, supported in her conversations by humans who understand their world. The plants suggest experiments that she should follow, and she listens. This theory and process is magnificent, adventurous and wild, and very brave. …
Monica Gagliano has written a unique book. It is a memoir of a kind describing her experience of learning from the voices of various plants: Socoba (Bellaco-caspi), Tobacco, Corn, Ayahuasca and others. The voices tell stories and help direct her scientific research.
The first half of the book is brilliant. It is fluid and calm, poetic and playful. Despite Gagliano's blinkered view of her own privilege (she writes as if everyone has the freedom to travel freely around the world and work in universities), it reads wonderfully and creatively and she constructs a philosophy that is like an intersection between Deleuze & Guattari and Donna Haraway, although not calling on either. Instead she calls on various plants, supported in her conversations by humans who understand their world. The plants suggest experiments that she should follow, and she listens. This theory and process is magnificent, adventurous and wild, and very brave.
However, when the experiments begin, they are not particularly nuanced and we only see the ones that support the claims she is making. While the ideas are terrific and the results are exciting, there is a lack of scientific rigour. For example, an experiment works on peas in isolation, showing how they can be trained to respond to stimuli like Pavolv's dogs, but there is no follow-on to see if this might work in other conditions. It probably would, and I would love to believe it, but claiming success in such experiments only repeats the mistakes that Gagliano criticises in science, where there is a blindness to other results, particularly those you do not want to see. Further to this, there is a lot of anger against the academic world on the later pages (sometimes justified, at other times harsh) and repeated claims to have 'discovered' truths that have already been presented by many theorists and artists over the past few hundred years (and likely much longer).
In the end, the plants speak, and Gagliano listens, but it feels like if she had listened to some more humans she might have an even broader story to tell. Maybe someone else will take on this mantle, and hopefully will be inspired by some of the wonderful work that is presented here.
The island of Mingheria plays host to a doubly deep deception by the master storyteller Orhan Pamuk. The book opens by telling us it is written by a fictional historian, followed by an introduction to the fictional Mediterranean island where the history takes place. The events surround a spread of plague on the island in 1901, and its social and political consequences. Interestingly, Pamuk began writing it with the advice of epidemiologists before the COVID-19 pandemic began, but it echoes many socio-polotical events of that period.
While the character elements of the story are a little hollow, the book is flawless when it deals with the entangled machinations of political intrigue. The author (both the false narrator and the authentic writer) show a keen sense of how politics, religion and social norms entwine in and around events like an epidemic, quarantine measures, and public health. More than this, Pamuk takes …
The island of Mingheria plays host to a doubly deep deception by the master storyteller Orhan Pamuk. The book opens by telling us it is written by a fictional historian, followed by an introduction to the fictional Mediterranean island where the history takes place. The events surround a spread of plague on the island in 1901, and its social and political consequences. Interestingly, Pamuk began writing it with the advice of epidemiologists before the COVID-19 pandemic began, but it echoes many socio-polotical events of that period.
While the character elements of the story are a little hollow, the book is flawless when it deals with the entangled machinations of political intrigue. The author (both the false narrator and the authentic writer) show a keen sense of how politics, religion and social norms entwine in and around events like an epidemic, quarantine measures, and public health. More than this, Pamuk takes many satirical shots at nationalism and nationhood, employing as a punchline the fictional island nation of Mingheria at a time when nation states were becoming a way of politically understanding territory in many parts of the world.
Proxopera is a relentless novella, set in the Troubles in Northern Ireland and told at a furious pace. It is ostansibly about a family held hostage by three IRA members while one of them is told to drive a bomb into the local town.
On a subtler level it speaks to the senselessness of violence, winding and weaving through snippets of old stories remembered by the central character. Brutal, poetic, and sometimes darkly funny, it is a harsh reminder of the violence of the near past in Northern Ireland.
Interspecies Kinship
Contributors: Sharon Blackie, Nickole Brown, Brenda Cárdenas, Ourania Emmanouil, Monica Gagliano, Anne Galloway, …
Making Kin with Nonhmans
4 stars
This is the third book in the series Kinship. It is a series of essays and poems, this volume focussed on relationships betqeen human and nonhuman kin. Like the first two, it suffers from a white bias and a US-centric viewpoint in some of the essays, but mostly it contains some wonderful writing and is the best in the series so far.
Standout articles are by the always-brilliant Anne Galloway and her kinship with sheep, Merlin Sheldrake's thoughts on fungi and lichen, and Richard Powers' thoughtful considerations on the degrees of separation between us and other creatures (although that essay also contains one of the series' most damning howlers in reference to the Rwandan genocide). Great, broad essays and a worthwhile book.
A clear, thoughtful, and wide-reaching exploration of complex systems, in theory and in practice. Meadows …
System System
2 stars
Donella Meadows is one of the 20th Century's most well known systems theorists, mostly due to her landmark book Limits to Growth. This follow-on, written in the 90s and published in 2006, is a high-level introduction to systems theory.
As a basic book on a subject, it is accessible and sometimes enjoyable. It is strongeSt when Meadows is exploring comcepts like nonlnear systems, where as a reader you can consider the implications. But the book is not well written, and uses far too many examples, sometimes contradictory ones, without useful evidence or theory. While it is refreshing to see a stance in the 90s that supports systemic change, other more recent books do this better.
Also, the unapologetic references to Garrett Hardin are pretty unpalettable to anyone who knows about him.
What is at stake in naming data centres as data farms? These installations are essentially …
Data decentred
3 stars
This is a research object presented as a series of essays and musings on data infrastructure in different nations and political regions. It is as much a philosophical dive into the idea of data centres as it is a technical or sociological book. Although the metaphor of 'farms' never really materialises in the text (despite the editor's promises at the beginning), the deeper connections of data to infrastructure and geopolitics make for fascinating and thoughtful reading. The design is also terrific.
Although the chapters are by different authors, the overall voice feels like it is collective and cohesive. There is a tendency for the essays to repeat musings on infrastructure, as there are natural overlaps in different studies, which could have been trimmed out.
Multispecies Storytelling in Intermedial Practices is a speculative endeavor asking how we may represent, relay, …
Multiple perspectives on Multi-species Storytelling
3 stars
This is a strong collection of essays, poems and artworks by philosophers, poets, academics and artists writing on multispecies storytelling. It includes well-known figures like Vinciane Despret and Helen V. Pritchard alongside others who are newer to the field. The essays are all very different, taking perspectives from rodents, cockroaches, dogs, penguins, fungi and many others in an array of stories.
The diversity of the essays is a strength and a weakness for reading this through, as it is hard to move from one to another fluidly. However, this is not that type of book. It is exploratory and playful. The best moments are in a poetic and fun exploration by Gillian Wylde, an artistic collaboration with cockroaches by Adam Dickinson and a wonderful essay of a journey of learning with cows by Emily McGiffin. Worth a read for anyone interested in this area.
Nan Shepherd is famous today for her wonderful book exploring the Cairngorm mountains, The Living Mountain. This book, The Quarry Wood, came earlier and is s novel, concerning a protagonist Martha and her life going into university education.
The narrative flows very well, and the dialogue is brilliant, written in part in Scottish phonetic. However, the story doesn't ever really get going, and although it does describe an interesting set of characters and time, I found the book too slow to enjoy fully. It is more a poetic description of a time and place than a novel.
Simone Weil is sometimes seen as a contentious philosopher, although I often wonder if that is mostly because she died young in a fraught time. Had her ideas developed, with a broader context, they might have resolved into more complete arguments.
This short compilation of three essays from the 1940s is a good example of her brilliance, her contentiousness and her unresolved ideas. The title essay is a thoughtful deep dive into how power is maintained through language, focussing on the dominant communist-fascist dichotomy of the time. The second essay, Human Personality considers individual and collective personhood, but makes broad claims about individuality that miss glaring counter-arguments that seem obvious, at least in today's philosophies. The third essay, The Needs of the Soul is from Weil's magnum opus, "The Need For Roots", and even in that book it felt unresolved. It deals with how rootedness and moral philosophy are entangled. …
Simone Weil is sometimes seen as a contentious philosopher, although I often wonder if that is mostly because she died young in a fraught time. Had her ideas developed, with a broader context, they might have resolved into more complete arguments.
This short compilation of three essays from the 1940s is a good example of her brilliance, her contentiousness and her unresolved ideas. The title essay is a thoughtful deep dive into how power is maintained through language, focussing on the dominant communist-fascist dichotomy of the time. The second essay, Human Personality considers individual and collective personhood, but makes broad claims about individuality that miss glaring counter-arguments that seem obvious, at least in today's philosophies. The third essay, The Needs of the Soul is from Weil's magnum opus, "The Need For Roots", and even in that book it felt unresolved. It deals with how rootedness and moral philosophy are entangled.
Overall, this is a good selection of Weil's work and a nice book to consider some of her ideas with, and to understand why she is both revered and derided by philosophers today.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who …
Beauty despite violence
5 stars
This novel by Ocean Vuong is told from a first-person narrative as an autobiographical story written to the protagonist's mother. But using this as a device, it tells multiple stories simultaneously. Each is almost a parable, and none is independent of another. It takes place in the USA primarily.
The protagonist relates his coming into the world, his childhood, his first love, his violent youth, his grandmother's love for him (and her past life in Vietnam), and his experiences of grief. Entangled are the acts of violence of the Vietnam War, the estrangement of the protagonist from his two nations, drug addiction and abuse, philosophy and thoughts on how words find meaning. The story alone is uncomplicated, and ticks along at a pleasant pace, but the poetic undertones and masterful weaving of story with concept make it a wonderful experience. To paraphrase Vuong's words: This book is not created from …
This novel by Ocean Vuong is told from a first-person narrative as an autobiographical story written to the protagonist's mother. But using this as a device, it tells multiple stories simultaneously. Each is almost a parable, and none is independent of another. It takes place in the USA primarily.
The protagonist relates his coming into the world, his childhood, his first love, his violent youth, his grandmother's love for him (and her past life in Vietnam), and his experiences of grief. Entangled are the acts of violence of the Vietnam War, the estrangement of the protagonist from his two nations, drug addiction and abuse, philosophy and thoughts on how words find meaning. The story alone is uncomplicated, and ticks along at a pleasant pace, but the poetic undertones and masterful weaving of story with concept make it a wonderful experience. To paraphrase Vuong's words: This book is not created from the violence of the past, but in spite of it. It is created from beauty, and it is beautiful.
![House Made of Dawn [50th Anniversary Ed] (Paperback, 2018, Harper Perennial Modern Classics)](/images/thumbnails/covers/54051d1e-cbef-46df-a6c5-331562b72596/2a035e3d0032ea672cc1ad071ae0ebb3.webp)
